Smoking in public still enough to spark an occasional flare-up

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 12, 2008

Think the battle over smoking in public has died down since the passage of the smoking ban? Apparently tempers still flare occasionally.

"I will be back," vowed Meg Dalton in one of the heated e-mails she and John Bayliss, owner of Fremont's English-style The George & Dragon Pub, have exchanged for weeks about smoking on the bar's deck. Bayliss, during the argument, had banned Dalton from his establishment.

The exchange began May 19 when Dalton e-mailed Bayliss saying she was new in town and had gone to the bar during the two previous weekends. "On all of these occasions both of your outdoor decks were full of smokers and the smoke was billowing into the inside of the bar," she wrote. "This is unacceptable and I trust that you will immediately correct this situation."

Dalton had copied the health agency, Public Health -- Seattle & King County, which sent inspectors to the bar, and after finding someone smoking, issued a warning, agency spokeswoman Hilary Karasz said. Inspectors will go back and the next violation will carry a $100 fine, she said.

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But Bayliss, not pleased by the inspection, blamed Dalton in a June 4 e-mail for cutbacks: "so thank you very much ... now our business sales have dropped because the smokers can't smoke outside ... they are just going to go to one of a thousand places where people smoke on patios or outside the bars. So now I will have to terminate the employment of several staff ... "

But Dalton responded that Bayliss' "customers wouldn't go elsewhere if the law were being enforced uniformly"; the exchange continued for a couple of more days, leaving hard feelings.

"I'm too angry," Bayliss said one afternoon this week, refusing to talk about the exchange.

Dalton also declined. "I can't go there right now," she said in an e-mail.

In fact, bars and taverns statewide have seen a greater increase in business than before the smoking ban's passage in 2005, according to a state Department of Revenue study released Tuesday. Watering holes saw 20 percent more revenue in 2007, compared with the 0.3 percent gain it saw in 2006, the first full year with the ban.

Department spokesman Mike Gowrylow said some establishments -- as Bayliss claims -- may have been hurt by the ban, but the industry as a whole "appears to have found a way to adapt and prosper," he said.

Attracting more nonsmokers probably more than offsets the loss of smokers, he said.

But Dalton's complaint raises questions about why clouds of smoke still hang over some bar patios and balconies, more than two years after smoking was banned in bars and restaurants, and within 25 feet of doors, windows and air vents.

Inspectors respond to complaints, Karasz said, but if no one is complaining, no one's getting cited. Since smoking has all but disappeared inside restaurants and bars, complaints have decreased from about 40 a week right after the law's passage, to about five or 10 weekly now.

At least in some of the handful of Seattle bars that allow smoking on their decks, employees said smokers and nonsmokers seem to have reached detente over lighting up outside.

"If people ask if they can smoke outside, I tell them if the health department asks, I said, 'No,' " said the manager of one bar in South Seattle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Like Bayliss, she wondered about people who would call the authorities before asking smokers to put out their cigarettes.

The bar the woman manages received one warning after a couple of "middle-aged women" complained, she said, "But we don't get many tattletales."

At a bar near downtown with smokers on the deck, the owner -- who also asked not to be identified -- said, "The nonsmokers are just happy there's no smoke inside now. They don't care if anybody smokes outside."